


my girl is tall with hard long eyes

by idekman



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, references to cliched erotic poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 12:51:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12771465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idekman/pseuds/idekman
Summary: He returns the book the next day. She’s asleep, curled up on her sofa, the window shut. She looks so small like this, fragile and vulnerable and not at all like the electric force of nature she is in waking.





	my girl is tall with hard long eyes

She takes a cutting from the flowers a day or two after he visits the apartment with them.

She doesn’t tell him about it. Puts it in a planter and waits for it to grow, out on the little balcony by her bedroom that can only be seen from the apartment the building over. It is her secret, something blossoming and growing that she is not yet ready to share.

 

‘What’s that?’

Micro glances up from the monitors, blinking those big, sleepy eyes at him. His brows twitch together.

‘Page, right?’ He leans across, taps his knuckles on the screen. ‘Did I get the right place –’

‘It’s the right place,’ Frank grits out, pissed in a way he can’t parse out. He grinds his teeth together and Micro’s staring at him like he’s gone insane, huddled up in that stupid blanket of his.

‘For your system. You know, with the flowers and the – the bullshit, and – I thought it would be easier,’ Micro interrupts himself, because Frank is still glaring at him, shoulders wound tight like a coil, ready to snap and whip free. ‘So you don’t have to keep going by her place everyday.’

He feels the tension slowly unwind but – but still. He’s not sure if he likes it. The cameras, the invasiveness of it, Karen would be so pissed if she knew –

 _(and, a quieter part of himself murmurs, whispers into the messy recesses of his mind_ , he had liked the visits. _Had liked the security of seeing her, physically, through the window. She would leave the lights on so he could spot her at night. Some days she’d pretend not to see him, others she would glare at him and twitch the curtains shut. Some days, though – on the best days – she would open the window and turn whatever dumb shit she was watching on the television up, and he would sit for a little while with her. Never more than ten minutes –  fifteen tops – but they would be together, separated only by an open window and distance. He perched on the roof opposite, listening to the buzz of her television set and watching the way she smiles, knees pulled up to her chest, shoes kicked off.)_

‘I can get rid of it,’ Micro’s telling him with that strange, meandering lilt he lends to every half-question he asks – but Frank’s already shaking his head, stalking away, picking up the well-thumbed copy of _Ulysses_ he’s been inching his way through.

 

Around the same time he finishes _Ulysses_ a slim book appears on Karen’s window sill. He ignores it. He hasn’t been by in weeks. A few days later the flowers appear, pointedly. They’re beginning to lilt. Micro shoves the screen his way, distracted, and Frank nods, ducks his head against the sudden sense of vulnerability crawling up the back of his neck.

 

He takes the book and replaces the flowers.

Lilies, this time. The smell reminds him of her, sweet and clean and light.

 

She had left him a poetry book. He reads it all the way through once and then over again. He can feel Micro staring at him as he flips over the last page and goes right back to the beginning.

He ignored the page she’d folded the corner over. Had been saving it, had skipped straight past it – but when he’d finished, and he’d realised it was time, his heart had thundered in his chest. And he’d just started again, because he’d been so scared. Scared of some words on a page.

 

He buries the book at the back of a drawer.

 

He doesn’t read it until he’s taken two bullets for her and held a gun to her throat and pressed his face, his skin, his hands to hers, breathed the same breath and let her steal the air from his lungs, everything tremoring and brain a blank wall of fear, fear that she was going to leave him, be taken from him, fear in that elevator that it would be the last time they saw one another and he couldn’t do what he had secretly, so desperately wanted – to bury himself within her, to wrap his arms around her sternum and press his mouth to her clavicle and not let go.

Instead – instead of all that, all that multitude of things – he had left.

The book remains at the back of the drawer. Late at night, when Micro is asleep, with the hum of computer monitors and dank glow of screens secluding him, he pulls it out. Turns to that page and reads the poem. Unfolds the folded corner, presses his fingers against the page, listens to the scratch of skin against paper. Imagines her reading this poem for the first time, falling in love with its rhythms and cadences, and finally allows himself to rest.

 

_I don’t know what it is about you that closes_

_and opens –_

 

He returns the book the next day. She’s asleep, curled up on her sofa, the window shut. She looks so small like this, fragile and vulnerable and not at all like the electric force of nature she is in waking.

 

He watches the way her face floods red as she unfolds the new crease he’d made. Reads the words – her lips are moving, just slightly, and he wonders if she’s murmuring it aloud to herself.

_My girl’s tall with hard long eyes._

And the rest of it, _twining legs and grimly to bed_ and when he had read it he’d been shocked like a sledgehammer at the thoughts of her and the blood rushing to his face. He thuds with it, the urgency of his wanting, as he watches her face flush. She chews on her thumbnail, hair flipped over to one side and then the other in that way she does, the way that leaves her fingers buried in her hair that drives him just crazy –

 

Long after it all, after the blood and the carousel and Dinah Midani with bruises under her eyes and vengeance in her teeth, he goes to see her again. His voice is rough and ready with guilt as he tells her about the camera feed – and at first she looks pissed. But then her mouth quirks in an odd motion, one he thinks must be designed to torture him, and she tells him, with a shrug, to leave it up.

 

She leaves him another book of poetry. This time she underlines a few lines, in fine biro, so small he almost misses it amongst the words he is amassing, the strange discords and stanzas he can’t wrap his head around –

_Round her chamber hums –_

His face flushes and he reads the poem again – _Come slowly – Eden!_ – and feels every part of himself like a livewire, can tell exactly where his skin meets the sheets of his bed and where his palm lies, flat on his stomach, the skin there calloused and his fingers drift to his belt buckle, considering, and –

 

He leaves the feed running here and there. Micro had set it up on his laptop before they’d parted ways, that strange, knowing look on his face that Frank tries hard not to consider.

The radio hums in the background, some old classic rock station, and he lifts the lid on his laptop gingerly. He never watches – just keeps an eye, every now and then.

Except now –

Now, her fingers are on the buttons of her blouse. She’s lit by the warm glow of the lamp and she perches on the back of her sofa, undressing almost casually, and everything in him runs dry – his mouth, his throat, the palms of his hands, prickling oddly.

She pulls her blouse off and then the skirt and she is a long streak of pale and leanness and he thinks, if he doesn’t look away soon, he might die, and –

She looks at the camera.

 

Later, as they lie together, naked on the bed, she pulls a book from her dresser.

‘No more poetry,’ Frank murmurs into the soft skin of her neck and she nods, reads prose aloud to him until he’s groaning – _ribcage turned into two parallel rollercoaster tracks_ – and pulling her towards him, desperate and heady all over again, and she sinks into his skin as if she were melting.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on tumblr im hipsterfrankcastle  
> look i know e e cummings is a cliched fuck but i do genuinely love is poetry so leave my basic ass alone thanks


End file.
